Last night I crashed my mud about 20 times trying to get the area convert tool to work
it seemed to totally screw with my vnum allocation, and then it merged all the other areas into 1 big area called my areasname.are

I dont know if this is something to do with me having a vnum assignment higher than stock smaug 45000 - 45500
(that was a brain fart that I just had)

But on the the Description of my topic.
I am going to forge on and try to create a document and some pretty decent manuals for the OLC in AFK.

If any of you have some basic docs (the docs that describe what the mobs,rooms,and ob's are constructed out of are not much help) that you can share with me - perhaps you started on this project a while ago and never finished.
or If some of you would like to take a particular piece of it

The first one that I will be working on is the oredit and then the redit (it does not seem as though I can put additional flags on exits with oredit) but the.................................. redeit bexit dir flags .....does.

So I will be atttacking the room editing first.

Like I said if any of you have partial docs and helps please let me have them. and if any of you want to do the objects, mobs, or PROGS!!!! It would be greatly appreciated.

The Progs is the big one that I know nothing about - so that would really be great.

Now I know that some of you are thinking well there are tons of OLC manuals out there already
Yes there are - for Smaug, DIKU and all the others
None for AFK - and I think there are significant changes between smaug and AFK to warrent it's own manual.

While it may be true that the menu-based OLC hasn't been documented very well, the command-based OLC is documented nicely in several places. The file that contains all of the information to construct the area by hand is also a good reference tool for online building. And as Dwip pointed out, the helpfiles for nearly all of it are also very good, thanks to Cam. The command-based OLC hasn't changed significantly with AFK vs Smaug. There are some new formulas to perform autocalculation of some things, but aside from that, the fundamental interface to it is the same. You still use oset, mset, and redit. The commands still take the same arguments. AFK has simply added a few things here and there that aren't covered in the other online docs. So with that in mind, it would be far easier for you to obtain a copy of those and add to them as needed. Beats the hell out of writing them all from scratch.

Cool. That works too. If it helps you learn what you need to learn, then that's good. And if you can create a visual doc of the whole process, so much the better. However, I'd advise against using PDF format for the final doc. PDF files are needlessly large, code bloated, and slow to work with even on a fast machine. I personally can't stand them and wish the format would just die quietly and never come back.

I, personally, think they should be written in sierra's AGI engine in sort of an "Sierra ON-LINE interactive tutorial". But then again I have nothing wrong with pdf files.. they seem to load fine on my BeOS machine.

I'm *trying* to work on some docs, on top of everything else I'm doing. Issue with docs are this: If you write it 'For Dummies', it'll be too light for some. If you write it more average, some won't understand it at all.

I hardly use the menu-based OLC, but I don't even understand WHY you'd need a doc for it. It's even easier than command-line OLC, which is documented everywhere as you said. And forget saying AFK is different than SMAUG's OLC... the major differences are Overland and tweaking of various flags and such. When you boil it down to the hard-core basics, the commands in AFKMud are a bit different, but they work the same.

If you're just a builder asking about this, then you may want to nag at your Admin for some help. If you're an Admin or Coder, then you really should take some time to dive through the build.c and like files and figure out how it goes together. That in conjunction with the help files and the immtrain.are which should be on the website (Thanks Samson!) are excellent places to start.

You need to have drive to build anyways, and no manual can teach you that.